Jean-Jacques Perrey et son Ondioline - digital booklet

When we think about the pioneers of
electronic music, we tend to remember a certain
kind of heroic vanguard figure. Composers who
sent probes into the deep unknown, discoverers
voyaging into disorienting alien zones of sound
with no landmarks for the lay listener in terms of
recognizably human emotions. The noises made by
the innovators of sound synthesis and tape-editing
— Karlheinz Stockhausen, Herbert Eimert, Iannis
Xenakis, Jean-Claude Risset, and others — tend
to suggest the “emotions” that might be felt by
asteroids or dwarf stars, or by neutrinos and other
sub-atomic particles: cold, remote, unfathomable
to the human heart. Often the titles of these
abstract early electronic explorations suggest distant
regions of the cosmos, astrophysical phenomena, or
forbidding voids: Charles Dodge’s Earth’s Magnetic
Field, Musica Elettronica Viva’s Spacecraft, Francois

Bayle’s ‘Espaces Inhabitables’.

Jean-Jacques Perrey, 1953

But there wads another kind of electronic

futurism — a forgotten future — being proposed in the 1950s and ‘60s.
It was made by composers who thrilled to the possibilities offered by the
new sound-making machines and techniques, but who had no interest
in leaving behind the sphere of human feeling, and instead made music
whose emotional palette encompassed humour, romantic yearning, wistful
nostalgia, insouciance, and frivolity. Rather than a pure plunge into the
absolute unknown, this was futuristic flavoured music that expanded or
elaborated upon existing genres and modes of entertainment: cabaret,
light jazz, chanson, film music. These were composers who generally lived
in the jobbing world of making a livelihood from music, as opposed to
tenured academics working at conservatories or for experimental units of
nationally-owned radio stations. They didn’t consider it demeaning or an
affront to Higher Purposes for music to have dealings with such worldly
and lowly considerations as being useful or appealing. So they deployed
electronic instruments and tape techniques in functional contexts like
music for dancing or relaxing; in incidental music or for films and

animated cartoons; as jingles in commercials.

This realm of “friendly futurism” — music designed to enchant, divert,
beguile, soothe, tickle, and lighten the heart — includes a number of post-
WW2 figures: Raymond Scott, Joe Meek, Ron Geesin, Kid Baltan & Tom
Dissevelt, the numerous technicians and composers involved in the BBC
Radiophonic Workshop, and edging into the 1970s, figures like Tomita
and Jean-Michel Jarre. One of the most illustrious of these amiable

experimentalists is composer/performer Jean-Jacques Perrey.

You could see Perrey as the polar opposite of his countryman Pierre
Schaeffer, the stern, lofty-minded originator of musique concréte. The
two had some brief interactions: Perrey was highly enthused by the
possibilities of using tape-editing techniques in the context of popular
music, but Schaeffer sniffed scornfully at the notion. For him, musique
concrete was all about leaving behind music as conventionally and
traditionally understood. Perrey saw it as an enrichment — a renewing
extension — of precisely music’s potential in terms of melody, harmony,
rhythm, arrangement, and emotional expression. In Dana Countryman’s
wonderfully detailed book about Perrey’s life, Passport To The Future, the
composer talks about wanting to make sounds that made people smile —
“hilarious sounds”, he called them — and expressed that his goal was to

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create MUSIC for fun or relaxation .

Jean-Jacques Perrey’s career profile — which

takes in performing on transatlantic cruise ships, traipsing across
Europe in a circus, and accompanying a stage hypnotist’s routine
— could not be further from the received image of the electronic
composer as a somber, bespectacled figure grappling with unwieldy
banks of computers. Oh, Perrey could make purely weird, almost-
abstract sounds when he wanted to — you can hear them in the more
ethereal moments of this collection, such as ‘Mars Reflector’ from his
1962 record Musique Electronique Du Cosmos. But when it came
to tape-editing he was drawn more to the potential for rhythmic
divertissement through super-syncopations, while his grand passion
for the Ondioline — the focus of this compilation — was based not just

in its timbral range but its expressive flexibility.

What drew him to the Ondioline — and drove the dedication that
made him become the instrument’s virtuoso non pareil — was the
combination of its mimetic powers (the way it could substitute for
existing instruments and lend itself to pastiche, stylistic allusion,
and sonic witticisms in the style of his beloved Spike Jones) with its

plangent emotionalism, the uniquely yearning ache of its timbre.

The story behind this compilation, then, involves both an inventor
and his invention (Georges Jenny, who created the Ondioline in
1939 and developed it continually until his death in 1975) and the
inventiveness of the musician and melodist who brought out its full

range of possibilities.

Born Jean Marcel Leroy in 1929, Perrey learned accordion as a boy,
picking it up by ear. Although he attended a music conservatory, he
never got very good at reading music from a score and was soon drawn
away from the formal studies of music into the realm of entertainment.
While still at the music academy he flouted its rules by playing
accordion at parties and in a jazz combo named the Jean-Jacques Perrey
Quartet (a composite of the members’ names, which then became his
own stage name). Perrey’s dalliances in the world of variété led to his
departure from the conservatory, which was not amused by his interest
in amusing people. Facing a fork in the road of his life — pleasing

listeners or edifying them — Perrey chose the path of delight.

Georges Jenny, inventor of the Ondioline, 1957

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In the late 1940s, Perrey’s ears were
tantalized by a sound on the radio: a demonstration of a new
instrument called the Ondioline by its maker Georges Jenny.
Seeing the potential to create an electronic musical instrument
that was more expressively flexible and wide-ranging in timbre
than the theremin or Ondes Martenot, Jenny had set to work
creating the Ondioline by extensively studying the harmonic
signatures of acoustic instruments, and devising circuits
that could approach their broad range of tone colours. As
recounted in Countryman’s Perrey biography, this was done
initially while Jenny was recovering from tuberculosis in 1939,
using a workshop he set up in the morgue of the hospital
of Saint-Hilaire. After winning the 1946 Concours Lepine,
France’s most prestigious competition for new inventions,

Jenny launched a company to produce Ondiolines.

Around this time Perrey had his radio epiphany and sought
out the inventor. He persuaded Jenny to let him have one
of the instruments in return for extracting to the utmost its
capacities and exploring its unknown potentials. During this
process, he developed what this collection’s compiler, Wally De
Backer, describes as his phenomenal “vibrato mastery”, as well
as the unique method of playing the keyboard with one hand
while manipulating the Ondioline’s filters with the other to

fluidly change the timbre during a performance.

Jean-Jacques Perrey and Georges Jenny, 1960s

“The circuitry of the Ondioline is so tich in
harmonics,” says De Backer. “Out of any of the tube-based instruments from
the early part of the 20th Century that made claims to imitating acoustic
instruments, the Ondioline is the only one that sometimes uncannily
approaches them. In Jean-Jacques’ hands it could almost be a violin. I love

his bongo playing on it. But he made so many new and unique sounds, too!”

Perrey so impressed Jenny that he was hired to be the Ondioline’s
public demonstrator at instrument fairs and personal showcases. As the
Ondioline’s one-and-only virtuoso he was sought out to play on French pop
records like Charles Trenet’s ‘L’'Ame des poétes’ (“The Soul of the Poets’).

Accompanying himself on piano with his left hand, while tweaking timbres

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and tickling the Ondioline with his right, Perrey next developed an act

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Small World amusement ride with its parade of national stereotypes and

called Around the World in Eighty Ways: a sort of exotica cabaret routine

tourist brochure clichés. In 1957, predating Raymond Scott’s Soothing
Sounds for Baby series by seven years — and the 1970s development of
ambient music by many more — Perrey made a now extremely rare proto-
New Age record titled Prélude au Sommeil (Prelude to Sleep) with the
Ondioline emitting sounds to calm the furrowed souls of the anxious, the
agitated, and the literally restless.

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including Edith Piaf, Jean Cocteau, Walt Disney, Johnny Carson, Leonard

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ii Monde) the popular album The In Sound From Way Out, produced with Gershon

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Kingsley in New York for the Vanguard label. Later in the 1960s Perrey

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E A NM = | cult-beloved albums that were rediscovered during the century’s end
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listening, retro-futurist electronic music, et al).
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But the heart of Perrey’s oeuvre and arguably
the great musical love affair of his life was the Ondioline. His early
work with the instrument, some of it issued on this compilation for
the first time, anticipates the zippy comedy of The In Sound From
Way Out. ‘Chicken On the Rocks’ pivots around an itchy-funky

riff whose croaky, creaky timbre looks ahead to the uses of wah-wah

guitar on certain Jimi Hendrix songs or Isaac Hayes’s “Iheme from

“Shaft”. It also prefigures the clavinet, that smoky-toned keyboard
used on ‘70s soul-funk classics like Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstitition’.
“The Ondioline, when Jean-Jacques uses it like that, has a really
attractive honk to it. The way it kind of pushes out and distorts in

the mid-range,’ comments De Backer. “It’s funky!”

Other pieces here such as ‘Dandelion Wine’ and the theme
from the 1959 film La Vache et le Prisonnier are more reflective
and wistfully melancholy, utilizing the Ondioline’s “yearning
quality in the higher registers,” says De Backer. “On these
recordings Jean-Jacques really made the instrument sing.” It’s
these bittersweet melodies and the tremulous way they’re played
— so starkly contrasting with the wildly whimsical sample and
Moog excursions of his later work — that reveal the poet’s soul

inside the entertainer Jean-Jacques Perrey.

What you hear on this collection, then, are golden moments in
a lifelong romance between a man and a musical instrument. This
is nowhere more apparent than on the album’s second side, which
is taken up entirely by an impossibly rare, edition-of-one acetate
disc created to showcase the Ondioline’s mimetic capacities as
regards to existing acoustic instruments as well as to illustrate the
scope it offered in creating unheard and unearthly tones. Here,
you can hear Perrey caressing and coaxing the potential of the

Ondioline with all the inquisitive tenderness of a lover exploring

the body of his beloved.

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ai.La Vache et le Prisonnier
main theme (excerpt)

THE ORCHESTRA OF PAUL DURAND FEAT. JEAN-JACQUES PERREY

Sometimes translated as The Cow and I, but literally
meaning The Cow and the Prisoner, La Vache et le
Prisonnier was the box office success of 1959 in France
and has proved an enduring popular favourite. It starred
Fernandel, the biggest comic actor in French cinema for
many decades, opposite a delightfully headstrong dairy cow

named Margueritte.

Based on Jacques Antoine's novel Une histoire vraie, the
film follows Charles Bailly (Fernandel), a prisoner of war
on a German farm, as he attempts to escape back to his
native France using Margueritte as a disguise, diversion and

source of dairy sustenance.

The memorable theme was composed by Paul Durand,
who was already a veteran of the French music industry
by the time he came to work on La Vache et le Prisonnier,
having variously filled the roles of organist in his local
church, piano player in Paris cabarets, conductor of
symphony orchestras for radio, and composer/conductor

for a number of feature films.

Durand selected Jean-Jacques Perrey, 20 years his junior,
but already the principal exponent of the Ondioline, to
carry the delicate, haunting melody that whistles like the
wind through the German landscapes Bailly and his cow

companion traverse throughout the film.

A vocal version of the theme entitled “Les mains du vent’
(“The Hands of the Wind’) was arranged by Durand for
Jacqueline Francois, a vocalist with whom he had enjoyed
earlier pop success, but unfortunately La Vache et le Prisonnier’s

original score has never been commercially released.

Excerpted here to focus on Perrey’s tender Ondioline
performance, Durand’s timeless melody marks the first

time the instrument was used in a film score.

Paul Durand, composer of La Vache et le Prisonnier.

a2. Visa to the Stars
(commercial arrangement)
LAURIE PRODUCTIONS FEAT. JEAN-JACQUES PERREY

The first release of “Visa to the Stars’ — different to the recording
presented here - appeared on the seminal Perrey & Kingsley album
The In Sound From Way Out. Recorded for Vanguard Records in
1965, the song closed out that LP’s second side with its galloping
guitar and wistful cowboys-in-space melody.

Perrey composed the tune with Angelo Badalamenti — at
the time writing and arranging under the name Andy Badale —
following work theyd done together making original music for
| "4 ) television’s Captain Kangaroo. The two were first introduced
se ees ee en oe a in New York by Carroll Bratman, a seasoned percussionist who
= _ owned and operated one of New York’s biggest musical instrument
rental companies. Bratman was Perrey’s sponsor in the USA and
had a business interest in the distribution of the Ondioline.

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The version of ‘Visa to the Stars’ you hear on this compilation
was produced in the late 1960s under the aegis of Laurie
Productions, an independent production arm of Laurie Records

that was set up by John Mack and Dave Mullaney to focus on
music specifically for commercials.

Working under Laurie Productions, Perrey found great success
in the advertising world, winning a Clio Award for his theme

for No-Cal soda, itself a rearrangement of the Perrey & Kingsley
number “The Savers’.

The largest audience for “Visa to the Stars’ probably came with
the use of this commercial arrangement in advertisements for
Esso. Perrey tells the story that when the tune was presented to
the CEO of Esso, the man’s immediate and explosive response
was “this is the best piece of music I’ve ever heard!”

Pacier than the In Sound From Way Out version, the
arrangement of “Visa To The Stars’ presented here showcases a
more spirited performance from Perrey on the beautiful lead

Ondioline melody. It was transcribed and restored from a rare
Laurie Productions 7” sampler.

Carroll Bratman with a small portion of his extensive rare instrument collection, 1960s

a3. Chicken on the Rocks

JEAN-JACQUES PERREY

‘Chicken on the Rocks’ is one of two pop numbers
closing out Musique Electronique Du Cosmos (Electronic
Music from Outer Space), an album of library music that
Perrey recorded in 1962 which otherwise comprises short

atmospheric cues of layered Ondioline textures.

The album was commissioned by Sam S. Fiedel, who
independently funded and released it, pitching the music
to radio and television stations. Fiedel had heard Perrey’s
recording experiments through the wall of the small studio
that Carroll Bratman had set up for the Frenchman in the

Carroll Musical Instrument Service building.

Another significant connection that Perrey made at
Carroll’s was with the virtuoso percussionist, recording
artist and educator Harry Breuer. Breuer was almost 30
years Perrey’s senior, but they struck up a potent creative
partnership, later producing a cult-beloved instrumental
album together for Pickwick Records entitled The Happy
Moog (Perrey went uncredited, being contracted to
Vanguard Records at the time). Breuer co-wrote ‘Chicken
on the Rocks’ and “Barnyard in Orbit’ — the latter featured
later in this compilation — and contributed mallet

percussion to both arrangements.

The scores for Musique Electronique Du Cosmos (which
bear the title Electronic Symphonie, Part III) mark the
first appearance of Perrey’s significant writing pseudonym,

Pat Prilly. Perrey used this name extensively in the 1970s

when he produced a series of “Moogsperiment” LPs for the

Montparnasse 2000 label in France. Scores for a number of
other Electronic Suites co-composed by Perrey and Fiedel
exist in Perrey’s archive, but no recordings of these pieces are
known. Vinyl copies of Musique Electronique Du Cosmos
are now extremely rare (only 500 were pressed), and the
small number that have surfaced have fetched incredibly
high prices from diehard Perrey collectors.

The front cover of the album states that the music was
“recorded in Paris” but the tracks were actually committed
to tape in Fiedel’s New York apartment over many months
of intermittent sessions. The misdirection was printed to
avoid problems with the musician’s union since the budget
for the recording was small and musicians played for less

than union scale.

‘Chicken on the Rocks’ is based on the much-interpreted
folk song “Chicken Reel’, composed by Joseph M. Daly in
1910. Harry Breuer had actually recorded his own version
of the tune for Brunswick Records years earlier, as had Les
Paul in his pioneering vari-speed multitracking style, a big
inspiration for Perrey. But the flourishes of formants that
Perrey coaxes from his Ondioline on this recording speak
and squawk so freakishly that the track blasts out of its

simple twelve-bar strictures into a realm all its own.

ABOVE: Harry Breuer, 1960s
RIGHT: Sam §S. Fiedel, 1960s

a4. Danielle of Amsterdam

ANGELO BADALAMENTI & JEAN-JACQUES PERREY

Written around 1969, when Badalamenti was arranging and
producing The Amazing New Electronic Pop Sound of Jean-Jacques
Perrey — the first solo album Perrey made for Vanguard Records
after splitting with collaborator Gershon Kingsley — this delightfully

carnivalesque tune was named after a girlfriend of Perrey’s.

Years later Badalamenti adapted the theme to score his first
feature film, with Perrey reprising the catchy lead melody on a
variety of Ondioline timbres. The film, Law and Disorder, starred
Ernest Borgnine and Carroll O’Connor as two 1970s New York
residents fed up with the city’s escalating crime problem, who
decide to create an auxiliary police force in their Lower Manhattan
neighbourhood. The difficult jump between comedy and drama
that the film attempts is sometimes bridged by the inflected
interpretations of Badalamenti’s theme, the melody somehow
managing to underscore both absurd situations and more dramatic

moments later in the story.

Released here for the first time, this “pop” arrangement of
‘Danielle of Amsterdam’ is a memorable meeting point of Perrey’s
expressive Ondioline playing — the “la’-like singing sound achieved
by adjusting one of the instrument's filters just after each note’s
attack — and the then-in-vogue sound of the Moog. The version
presented here was transcribed and restored from an acetate from

Perrey’s personal archive.

Angelo Badalamenti, 1960s

Georges Jenny at a 1950s stage model Ondioline

as. Cigale

THE ONDIOLINE ORCHESTRA FEAT. DICK HYMAN & JEAN-JACQUES PERREY

‘Cigale’ is one of the few pieces of music penned by Georges
Jenny, inventor of the Ondioline. Accounts of others exist
— ‘La Berceuse a l’enfant qui ne vivra pas’ (“The Lullaby for
the Child Who Will Not Live’), written just before WWII,
and later “Fou de Vence’ (‘Crazy About Vence’) — though
recordings of these tunes remain elusive. Perrey recounts
that Jenny had the melody for some time before asking him

to flesh it out into a complete song.

Carroll Bratman was very taken with the melody of
‘Cigale’, as he was with the sound of the Ondioline too,
so — looking for avenues to get the instrument heard by a
wider audience — he commissioned the recording session
that resulted in this and one other marvelous piece of

Ondioline music.

The other song from the session was “North Beach’,
written by Dick Hyman, a jazz pianist, organist, arranger
and composer who later, like Perrey, took an interest in
the Moog modular synthesizer. Perrey and Hyman had
previously performed together on multiple Ondiolines on
Arthur Godfrey’s radio show to promote the little electronic

instrument that was still entirely new to American ears.

Hyman helmed the three hour recording session at AXR
Studios, New York with six other musicians on June 2, 1964,
the ensemble dubbed The Ondioline Orchestra. Listening
to the richness and musicality of textures and performances
across these two tracks it’s remarkable to think they were
recorded in such a quick session; it’s testament not just to
the incredible level of musicianship of New York’s session
players of the mid 1960s, but also the studio engineers that

could record great performers with sensitivity and detail.

Notes from Dick Hyman’s archive show that none of the
major record labels that were pitched the tracks took an

interest in releasing the recordings.

‘Cigale’ is released here for the first time.

as. L’'Gme des Poetes

CRARLES TRENET E? SON QUARTETTIE ON DIGLINIE FEAT. JEAN-TAG QUES PERREY

By the start of the 1950s Charles Trenet had been one of
France’s biggest singing stars for over a decade. Unusually
for the time, he only sang songs he composed himself,
though his lyrics and melodies had been made popular by
other vocalists at various times, sometimes before his own

versions were recorded.

In 1951 Trenet was looking for a special sound to
complement asong he had written entitled ‘L’4me des poétes’
(‘The Soul of the Poets’). He heard tell of the Ondioline
and Perrey — just 22 years of age, but already the virtuoso
of the instrument and its tireless public promulgator — was
urgently called home from a demonstration in Hamburg to

present the instrument to the famous singer.

Trenet told Perrey he was looking for “the sound of a
soul” and it seems that in the young Ondiolinist’s hands he
found it. So taken with the instrument was Trenet that he
dubbed his ensemble variously “son Quartette Ondioline”
or “son Trio Vigouroux Ondioline” for months of activities

after the recording of ‘Lame des poétes’.

Trenet’s lyric is wonderfully poetic; “Longtemps,
longtemps, longtemps aprés que les poétes ont disparu,
leurs chansons courent encore dans les rues” (“Long, long,
long after the poets have disappeared, their songs still

flow through the streets”). It is an affecting evocation of

Charles Trenet with trademark felt hat and cheeky grin

the highly active life a song can enjoy after its writer has
passed away, or when the lyric is disconnected from even

the possibility of knowing what inspired it.

Perrey contributed Ondioline to a number of other songs
with Trenet — among them ‘Ma maison’ (‘My House’) and
‘Mon vieux ciné (‘My Old Films’) — and he was subsequently
invited to tour with the singer around France. Trenet urged
Perrey to develop a show of his own to demonstrate his
ambidextrous piano and Ondioline abilities. He introduced
him to a writer to develop the show concept, resulting in
Around the World in Eighty Ways: a musical variety show
that allowed Perrey to showcase the imitative abilities of the
instrument as well as its capacity for special effects, and to
maintain a lighthearted mood with musical jokes and sonic
tricks. Perrey performed this show countless times around
France and other parts of Europe in the years leading up to
his New York adventures of the 1960s, and in the extended
demonstration recording of Ondioline timbres that is
presented later in this compilation, we hear the fruits of

this extensive road-testing of the instrument.

Here in ‘Lame des poétes’ though, is the sound of a
deft young instrumentalist bringing colour and texture to

another great artist’s work.

a7. Dandelion Wine

BILLY GOLDENBERG & JEAN-IJACQUES PERREY

Billy Goldenberg is an Emmy Award-winning composer
best known for his work for television and film, notably the
themes from Columbo and Kojak, and scores for Stephen
Spielberg’s telefilms Duel and Night Gallery. He has also
written songs that have been recorded by Barbra Streisand,
Liza Minnelli, and Diana Ross among others. But in 1967
he was still a young aspiring composer, relatively unknown

and writing for the stage.

That year Goldenberg collaborated with lyricist Larry
Alexander to musically adapt Ray Bradbury’s novel of
nostalgic reverie Dandelion Wine. Alexander had stumbled
on the book in a Grand Central Station paperback store
and the pair travelled to the west coast to play Bradbury
six demonstration songs they had composed. Bradbury was

enthused and helped to develop the show.

Goldenberg recounts that he was looking for an
instrument with an “otherwordly feel” to bring colour to
a small ensemble of musicians, and he found it through
Carroll Musical Instrument Service where his father Morris,
a famous percussionist and a friend of Carroll Bratman’s, had

heard Perrey’s recording experiments with the Ondioline.

This first musical version of Dandelion Wine was
performed just a handful of times in April 1967 as part
of the Lincoln Center Workshop in New York. Other

adaptations of the novel with new lyrics and score have been
performed since but, while some moves have been made to

revive it, the original piece remains sadly forgotten.

In Goldenberg’s original music, Perrey’s Ondioline was
called on to provide an assortment of orchestral sounds —
violin, piccolo flute and a honking bassoon — as well as
a wide array of effects, including the chirps of crickets,
electronic sparks from a “Happiness Machine” and the

cushioned squelch of “Para-Litefoot tennis sneakers”.

In something only slightly longer than a minute,
Goldenberg’s theme from Dandelion Wine modulates
around an exquisite nostalgic melody. Perrey’s aching
Ondioline delivery of it is a reminder that even after
extending his own composing/arranging abilities and
pioneering tape-edit production techniques on his best-
known work for Vanguard Records, he was deeply sensitive
to bringing out the emotional resonance of other composers’

work with his signature instrument.

The instrumental theme from Dandelion Wine presented
here was transcribed and restored from Perrey’s personal
copy of a privately pressed rehearsal recording. It is released

here for the first time.

The front cover of Perreys Dandelion Wine manuscript

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as. Barnyard In Orbit

JEAN-JACQUES PERREY

The best-known version of “Barnyard In Orbit’ appeared on Perrey &
Kingsley’s Vanguard Records debut The In Sound From Way Out, but it
lacked the freewheeling feeling of the earlier incarnation presented here.
Recorded by Perrey with Sam Fiedel and Harry Breuer for the library
album Musique Electronique Du Cosmos, it features a number of animal
sounds that Perrey could coax from the Ondioline’s wide timbral palette (a

donkey’s bray, a cat’s meow and the grunt of a pig amongst them).

Songs that became the album Musique Electronique Du Cosmos were
notated in three collections of material entitled Electronic Symphonie
Parts I, II and III. Recordings of other pieces notated in these manuscripts

are not currently known.

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ao. Serenade a la Mule

JEAN-JACQUES PERREY

Before he was called to New York in 1960 to demonstrate
the Ondioline for virgin American ears, Perrey recorded
two EPs of material for French label Pacific Records. The
first, Mr. Ondioline, presented an unforgettable front
cover, Perrey donning a dark hood with small slits for the
eyes and mouth in an attempt to conjure up the record’s
mysterious titular figure. Later on when Perrey appeared
as “Mr. Ondioline” on the Captain Kangaroo show, he did
so without the hood, presumably to spare the children, and
perhaps some adults, deep distress.

The second Pacific Records EP, released in 1961, was
entitled Ondiolinorama and was pressed in such small
numbers that it is now exceedingly rare, and greatly
prized by Perrey collectors. Both EPs were comprised of

Perrey’s arrangements of other composers’ works, including

established tunes such as ‘Nola’ and ‘Lover’ (the pair of
these given a guitar-based multitrack treatment years earlier

by one of Perrey’s prime inspirations, Les Paul).

The number from Ondiolinorama presented here
is. Serenade a lay Mule (Donkey “Serenade ), “and 1t
was written by Rudolf Friml, Czech-born composer of
operettas, musicals, and songs for screen. First heard in the
film adaptation of The Firefly, it was originally written by
Friml for the stage in 1912, the melody having become one
of his most enduringly popular when Perrey chose to record

it almost fifty years later.

The version presented on this compilation was
transcribed and restored from a work reel of 1/4” tape

sourced from Perrey’s personal archive.

WUSIQUE FLECTROMOLE DU COSIIOS

electronic music fromouter space

recorded in Paris by
AM a

aio. Mars Reflector

JEAN-JACQUES PERREY

The back cover of Musique Electronique Du Cosmos describes
Mars Reflector as “the musical effects of falling stars”. The piece
showcases Perrey’s ability to create engaging abstract soundscapes
using just the Ondioline’s register and timbre possibilities, varying
amounts of reverb, and the instrument’s fine tuning knob which

could be turned through a range of notes to attain smooth glissandi.

On this compilation, Mars Reflector acts as prélude to the
full-blown space popera of the side’s dynamic closing number,

‘Pioneers of the Stars’.

v

Pioneers of the Stars
LES (CHEVALi efS DES ETOLES
Cm PDsED kWd CACHESTRATED By

JEAM J. VPERREY
112 WEST 48th STREET
ON NEW YORK 36, NEW YOR

ai1. Pioneers of the Stars

(orchestral arrangement)
JEAN-JACQUES PERREY

The best-known version of “Pioneers of the Stars’ (French
title: ‘Les chevaliers des étoiles’) closed out the second
side of Perrey & Kingsley’s second collaborative LP for
Vanguard Records, Kaleidoscopic Vibrations. The record
was one of the first “Moog albums”, predating both the
popular success of Switched-On Bach and the spate of
cheaply produced cash-in records that looked to exploit
the growing public fascination with the strange but

compellingly named synthesizer.

It is unclear whether the version included on this
compilation predates the recording of Kaleidoscopic
Vibrations, though a few clues point towards it being from
an earlier phase of the 1960s where Perrey was experimenting

with a bigger orchestral sound for his compositions.

According to the label on the acetate, the piece was
recorded at A&R Studios, 112 West 48th Street in New
York, the same facility where The Ondioline Orchestra
recorded ‘Cigale’ and ‘North Beach’ in 1964, and the first
of many premises where this legendary studio operated
from. A&R were forced to move to a new location in 1967,
the year that Kaleidoscopic Vibrations was mostly recorded
and subsequently released, suggesting that this acetate dates

from an earlier time.

The acetate also has handwritten credits that state the
piece was “composed and orchestrated by Jean J Perrey”.
There is no mention of later co-composer Andy Badale
(Angelo Badalamenti) who has been registered with ASCAP
as a songwriter on the tune since Kaleidoscopic Vibrations’
release. Again, this points to the arrangement presented

here as an earlier experiment that Perrey undertook solo.

Although he no longer recalls the provenance of this
version of ‘Pioneers of the Stars’, Perrey does recollect that
to achieve the orchestral strings and big choir sound of this
arrangement he recorded smaller numbers of musicians,
layered the results and bounced multiple channels on the
tape recorder down to a single channel, thereby freeing up

other tracks for final overdubs of Ondioline.

Transcribed and restored from a 45rpm acetate from
Perrey’s daughter Patricia Leroy’s personal collection, this
is the first release of this unique version of one of Perrey’s
most triumphant melodies. This acetate is the single
known source for this piece of music and, having been
played many more times over the decades than the three
or four test listens such discs were designed for, it provided
decidedly less-than-stellar audio. But with extensive and
detailed restoration, it transmits here, on its first release,
the spirit of a superbly sprightly sound recording that

would otherwise be lost to history.

STANDARD
$3. 1/5 RPM

@

"QNDIOLINE"-SOUND EFFECTS

AND BACKGROUND

SATELLITE RECORDS, INC.

FORT LEE, N. J.

SIDE # 1

81-27. OOndioline demonstration recordings
from Satellite Records acetates

JEAN-JACQUES PERREY

Nothing is currently known about Satellite Records,
Fort Lee, NJ, where this extended demonstration of the

Ondioline was cut to vinyl sometime in the 1960s.

Transcribed from the single known instance of this
recording, the acetate was sourced from New York musician
and record collector Jeremy Novak, who chanced upon it

in the WFMU Record Fair’s bargain bin.

The artifact itself had not been well kept, and revealed
a great amount of noise and distortion of various varieties
upon transcription. It was determined that digitally
removing too much of this complex noise detracted from
the detail of Perrey’s Ondioline performances, so it is

presented here largely as-transcribed from the acetate.

The final message from Perrey delivers the revelation
that, in the 1960s, Georges Jenny was working on a system
for the Ondioline to produce fluid glissandi such as are so
beautifully facilitated by the Ondes Martenot. All available
evidence suggests the system was never commercially
released, but it’s fascinating to think what might have been
recorded by Perrey with this extra expressive dimension

applied to the Ondioline’s wide sonority scale.

This compilation marks the first release of this special
insight into Perrey’s deep exploration and mastery of the

Ondioline’s remarkable sound palette.

A hand-painted poster from Jean-Jacques Perrey’s archive, 1950s

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Jean-Jacques Perrey et son Ondioline
was produced by:

Wally De Backer

Chris Muth

Jamie Howarth for Plangent Processes
Joe La Porta for Sterling Sound
Kevin Gray for Cohearent Audio
Simon Reynolds

Henry H. Owings

Jeremy deVine

Dana Countryman

Susi O'Neill

Patricia Leroy

Takashi Okada

Jeremy Novak

ITC Global Translations

Marcel Bouret

Cybele Malinowski

Will Joines

Stoughton Printing Company
Record Technology Inc.

Jean-Jacques Perrey at home, 2015

research, curation, track notes, design, project coordination

vinyl transcriptions

tape transcriptions, audio restoration tracks I-11
mastering

vinyl cutting

liner notes

design & layout

layout, label management

research, curation, loans of artifacts

research

research, loans of artifacts

loans of artifacts

loans of artifacts

Ondioline poem translation

front cover caricature

photo of Jean-Jacques Perrey with his cardboard self
photo of 1950s stage model Ondioline

jacket and booklet printing

vinyl pressing

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The earliest commercially available Ondioline, the modeéle portatif (portable model)

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An early 1950s stage model Ondioline with a squared cabinet.

Ondioline, ma mie, 6 muse magicienne.
Nef voguant dans |’Ether sur des sons, inconnus,
Donne-moi |’Evasion; quand la coupe est trop pleine,

I] faut nous égarer loin des sentiers battus.
Orchestre les chants noirs de Saint-Louis aux nuits chaudes
Lance vers moi l’appel des vieux lieds dépassés;
Instrument, enchanteur, quelle est la voix, qui réde,
Nouvelle, et qui pourtant, épouse le passé?

Entends, ce soir mon coeur, et viens me I’apaiser.

Ondioline, my sweet, my magic inspiration,
Nobly you sail aloft upon unearthly sounds.
Do bring me, when my cup oerflows, my liberation:
Insouciantly let’s leave the beaten tracks and wander with no bounds.
Oh, play black music from those hot St Louis nights,
Let me now hear the strains of ancient Lieder call.
Instrument of my dreams, what is this voice in flight -
Novel, and yet, somehow, it holds the past in thrall?

Evening is nigh, my heart doth beat: come, soothe us all.

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ONDIOLINE
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Forgotten Futures